@Thomas, Thanks for the reference to the blog and your comments. I just wanted to clarify a couple points that I feel are important. First, the 151 days do seem arbitrary, but they are not "cherry picked"; this represents the time period we started to track this information. It is also important to note that the Google number represents all of 2012 so it does include any outages that may have happened. We continue to monitor this information and expect it to change over time. Second, as we point out in our blog post, and you reference here, Microsoft does not publicly publish this information. I think this is a very important piece of information because prospects cannot independently verify the numbers themselves. I have been suggesting customers go and do the research themselves, don't just rely on what we are telling them, or what Google and Microsoft say. The feedback from customers is "it is not possible to verify Microsoft's availability on our own". I'm glad to see Microsoft respond to your request, but guaranteeing a 99.9% uptime and delivering on that are two different things. Why don't they publish their uptime numbers (including scheduled maintenance downtime) and provide a publicly accessible dashboard?

"Google is more transparent about its failures than Microsoft at least has merit." REALLY VanVeet? Hmm what if Google actually counted all the outages that were 10 minutes or less. Yes thats the cherry picking that Google is doing - not quite the honest bunch.

Sorry Ive used both and Google email (which is used as some universities) is laughed when tried in the real world. It sucks, it seriously sucks!!

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.